The Schoolhouse of Modernity

This paper introduces the Schoolhouse of Modernity as an architectural analytic for understanding how modern schooling reproduces defuturing logics even as it claims to advance progress, equity, and sustainability. Extending critiques of the “House of Modernity,” we show how the Schoolhouse operates as a globally circulating blueprint—materialized through policies, metrics, infrastructures, and pedagogical norms that standardize learning and foreclose alternative futures. Through a room-by-room mapping of its architecture, we demonstrate how schooling organizes knowledge, subjectivity, and time in advance, rendering modernity’s assumptions natural and benevolent. Moving beyond reformist approaches, the paper advances a transition imagination oriented toward the undoing of the Schoolhouse through a set of situated gestures—unlearning, composting, hospicing, preserving, repairing, rewilding, and walking out—that resist synthesis, move at different tempos, and demand ongoing response-ability to power, relation, and place. Rather than offering solutions or blueprints, the paper reframes educational futures as processes of restorying—collective, relational, and more-than-human practices through which learning is reimagined beyond mastery, extraction, and universality in times of planetary uncertainty.